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To fail to prepare is to prepare to fail.
Have you seen the infinite chocolate bar video? If not, you can view it below:
There’s nothing like a bit of mind-blowing magic to awaken our sense of wonder and amazement! What if this really was a way to make infinite squares of chocolate?
Peel away the initial 'wow' moment, of course, and what comes next is the realisation that this must be an illusion. Some of us will think about it briefly before getting distracted, others of us will consider it more deeply. I had a great time, for instance, turning the whole demonstration into a line graph and using calculus to determine surface areas (once a maths teacher, always a maths teacher!) and to work out the mechanics of the illusion. A great opportunity to flex my mathematical muscle-memory, but the illusion also got me thinking philosophically…
How many times in our lives do we sit back and hope for a miracle, in spite of the well-established and well-known processes (which are probably somewhat painful, annoying or inconvenient) that have long been proven to work? Take revision, for example. An often-dull and always-challenging process, in which one must confront all past learning that hasn't gone so well, or that hasn't been used recently.
Revision takes time, effort, will-power, dedication, and resilience, as one confronts difficulty after difficulty in order to drive improvement. Yet we know revision works! We include retrieval activities in our lessons for the same reason - it builds muscle-memory and forces us to practise accessing material from our long-term memory. The more we practise, the better we become - just as in sport, music and other skilled disciplines.
In Drama, one might wait for one’s lines to be learned automatically, for example, in a world where we believe in the chocolate illusion. In football, one would become an international striker overnight. In music, one would be on stage at the O2 without ever picking up an instrument or song book. You get the point – this would be ridiculous.
However, it is equally ridiculous (yet somehow culturally more acceptable) to cut corners in exam preparation, expecting that – magically - what one didn't know before the exam started would pop into one's mind when the paper is open and that dreaded question is there, in black and white: a great white space to be filled with evidence that one understands. In detail.
There's no magic to cover that eventuality. No illusion that can cover up a chasm in knowledge, or a missing skill.
You'll have seen some attempts at illusions before - probably through funny internet memes like this one:
Amusing, admittedly, but worthless. Really, though, there are some magic words that will spare us all the need for an illusion, so long as we remember them:
To fail to prepare is to prepare to fail.
Benjamin Franklin.
‘Abracadabra’ it's not, but then revision, recall and retrieval isn't trickery. It's fine-tuned, honed, honest skill.
Don't wait for the magic to happen; don't waste time hunting for a cover-up illusion - get the ingredients right in the first place. The magic emerges on results day.
